We stalk the banks

of swamps and slow rivers

in silence, our voices too full

of clam shells for hunting.

We blossom in violence

spring-loaded heads

striking the mud

for insects, salamanders, frogs

our feathers arsenals

of indigo knives,

necks adorned

with fishbone needles.

Yet we fly so tenderly

blooming from rocks

slow wingbeats

folding the air

toward soft chests.

For some, we are easy,

conspicuous targets

for others, kites

pulling our own

strings through sunset

nectarine eyes

in winter’s bare trees.

You often see us

alone and wonder

how we mate

but you haven’t seen

what births us—the building,

the gathering, the shared

warmth of bodies.

Alaskan coastline

campus quad fountain

we will adapt.

We don’t come seeking

attention

tracing water

with a seamstress touch

but our exits are

subtle as drag queens

dropping coins

for starving poets.

Wherever we go

the marshes may dry

and the slick-calm ponds

may grow scales of ice—

they have, for centuries

but so have we persisted.

Soon, more than this,

we will know abundance

our beaks writhing with fish.

————————————–

Laura Casteel called us from Pittsboro, NC.

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I feel a grief for time taken

I feel a grief for time torn

I feel a grief that isn’t mine

I feel a grief for another body in my body

I watch The Chronology of Water knowing I will feel grief, and I do

I watch it while I’m sick, mucus stuck in my throat, blood in my nostril, air trapped and hard to reach

I watch The Chronology of Water with the book in my bag in my lap

I feel a grief that needs art

I feel a grief that bleeds art

I feel a grief that runs red, bitten, the director said her favorite color is bitten

I feel a grief that rivers

I feel a grief that needs art

I need art

I need art

Grief needs art

Grief needs art

I’m crying inside, the cry is a bubble in my lung, beating

I want to cry on the outside but my body isn’t

I want to cry but the pill I’m on makes it hard to

I used to cry when I didn’t want to which is why I wanted the pill

I used to bleed more than I was supposed to which is why I wanted the pill

I used to bleed for two weeks and through every pad every hour

I used to say the bleedpain feels like sharkteeth eating its way out of me

The last time I had bleedpain my lover ate it out of me

I used to feel the bleedpain for the week before I bled

I used to feel the bleedpain for the week after I bled

I wanted the pill to make the bleeding slow

I wanted the pill to make the bleedpain stop

I wanted the bleeding to stop

I wanted the bleeding to stop

I didn’t have enough room for it

I never had enough pads to absorb it

I don't have enough room for it

I wanted the bleedpain to stop

I didn’t have enough time for it

I don’t have enough time for it

I didn’t have enough time for it

I don’t have enough time for it

I didn’t have enough sick time for how much time I felt sick

I didn’t have enough sick time for how much time I bled

I didn’t have enough sick time for how much I bled

I don’t have enough time for how much time I feel sick

I don’t have enough time for how much time I feel sick so I call a doctor to call an office and the office calls me and asks if I really need what the doctor says I need and I ask the office how much more do they need how much more pain do they need how much more pain do they need how much more pain do they need to give me the time I need to be in pain

I don’t want to look at the news because the news is about people in pain

I don’t want to look at the news because the news is about people in pain

I look at the news because the news is about people in pain

I look at the news because the news is about people in pain

I look at the news at the people being killed

I look at the news because where else am I supposed to look

I look at the news because how else am I supposed to see

I want to scream so I write

I want to riot so I write

I want to break so I write

I want to burrow so I write

I want to grieve so I write

I want to stop so I write

I want to build so I write

I want to so I write

I want to I write

I want so I write

————————————–

Emma Sheinbaum called us from Brooklyn, NY.

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In corpse pose I practice feeling the satin lining of my coffin,

imagine the gently ruffled rim meeting my stiff skirt.

Next month, I’m attending a wedding in a cemetery,

and I can’t decide what people don’t like about that.

Who wouldn’t want to haunt their own grave

and then go dancing?

This month, my sister turns a quarter of a century

around in her pocket, contemplates saving it for later.

By the time I was her age, I’d spent my two cents on

stockings that would rip in the same line along my shins.

Today, I play dead on a yoga mat, like this will be the moment

I’m enlightened by mortality

and not like this feeling has been

shadowing me since birth.

I stretch out the elastic in my veins

as if they’re under warranty.

Head still, hands crossed over heart,

I inhale for a count of eight

decades to fog mirrors with the water

my body heats to steam each morning.

————————————–

Mary Geschwindt called us from New York, NY.

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For years the school bus took the same path

past your grandmother’s house—just uphill from yours

each day the fields flickering past,

sometimes filled with corn,

autumn filled with hay bales

that long swinging arm of the sprinkler

tempting in the summer heat, always running

as we’d drive back to your house

on the way home from town

and one year, many years later

homesick, soul-wandering spied dandelions

growing, a trove near the treeline

and parked near the ditch to sit for a moment

with my thoughts all running rampant

when they turned to you, and childhood

how second grade best friends lived extremes

up and down the hill, across the trampoline

riding top speed on gravel roads

I used to ride my bike to you,

we lived close enough to each other

it was possible for my little body to pedal

itself there and back without exerting

what it can’t spend

what it doesn’t have, maybe still lacks

the dandelions far across the field

yellow bright mirage in the distance

I would walk there now if you’d meet me.

————————————–

Nicholas Bonarski called us from Grand Rapids, MI.

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I’ve had enough of new names, new ways of trying to stop time,

it just creates more sleet in the steep curves of my pale existence,

of ways to prod and avoid the emotions that rock the course of

my continuance, which is entirely filled with paper birch trees—

during the short window available, my entity responds to anything

with the word “paper,” gets me mapping the “just was” page.

I wanted to have deeper words about the Caribou, new designations

that would help me “see,” but writing is always a walk in the dark,

dependent on the will of my body, including that variable, the brain.

If I had soft velvet horns and warming fur I might be okay with my

scattered disposition, instead I take umbrage with the time allotted—

the image of the glam reindeer in the cartoon I saw as a child, and

my fear of extinction in the future. What I learned then as we shifted

from one school to another, was the motto “adapt or die,” isn’t that

true of all of us? Especially for those stuck in migration patterns?

I thought it would change once I became an adult, could control my

own movements. I took stock of the temperature, tried to be kind.

The voyage can be one into lower realms, but that’s one of choice.

I want to excuse myself all the time and make adjustments, change.

I got stuck in the branches of the forest and had no herd to guide me.

I got here, for now, to a desk and typing—the entity with my name never

imagined months in the silence of a temporary haven. Most of the time

I look back at what can be culled so that I can mine it on paper or

communicate with you. From the first I wanted to please and repair

the scar, wanted her to see me, but the chaos around the musical

was full of wild animals and shadows. My body will evolve to cope,

or just end up in trampled grass. Remind me of where I want to go.

Oh yes, those northern landscapes where we won’t be dying of thirst.

————————————–

Eléna Rivera called us from New York, NY.

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There’s a hopeful part of me that thinks you love me more than you need to understand

But I know you because I’m the same as you,

Kindred Spirit grandpa

So I’ll tell you that: Ken dolls don’t have nipples

And what if he ended up that way by having top surgery,

Double incision for ultimate contouring?

Thus I think it stands that Ken is a transmasculine icon

Loved and adored as a god because that’s what Barbie and Ken are,

The deities that underscore what it means to be a person, that who we are is limitless.

Thus Ken being trans stands to reify our place in the natural order

And I think I’m like him in that my gender isn’t Barbie,

I’m separate and me and I don’t want my nipples.

In the end I’ll look like Ken, limitless

But I’m still the grandkid you play ping pong with every week

And this isn’t any more different than being a writer amongst a family of scientists

And I know you don’t get that either

So I’ll explain it as this:

I never really grew out of playing with Barbies and Kens

So the stories I’d give them

Now take the form of manuscripts

————————————–

L. Amariti called us from Voorhees, NJ.

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Angel Monet LoMax called us from Enterprise, AL.

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"a childhood bedroom is a whole world"

after Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

there was always someone

day-dreaming

hurtling towards the other world

falling for somebody’s son

grass-stained knees

weaving

in and out of love

condemning their mother tongue

twisting tradition

out of ghost tale

crossing an ocean

on a paper-mache boat

painting their nails black

dressed in robin’s egg blue

bright red gushing

between them legs

having a tea party

with a beast

mistaking a father for a prince

fathering the future from a question-mark

counting sheep

learning to read between the lines

reading limbs

shrouding their body in glitter

befriending the witch

within

making mud soup

under moonlight

drinking it all in

commending Mother Earth

bound by something soft

tender-hearted

beating on a kitchen pan drum

bruising their ego

begetting life in verse

crooning in arms

blessed

divinely

alive

————————————–

Gabriela González called us from Brooklyn, NY.

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frostbitten hands snatch at the cigarette

dangling from your lips and

you stoop to meet my gaze with a hangdog expression.

i want to be angry

(god, i want to be so angry)

because cigarettes will kill you in a lifetime, and –

i have handwarmers in my fucking pocket.

but love is a two-way street, so it doesn’t matter if

my pockets are overflowing with iron powder and saltwater, or if

my hands offer woolen mittens, or if

i crank the heat in my bedroom to ninety degrees

with just the friction of my hips on yours.

love is a two-way street, and

if your frostbitten hands won’t drop their carcinogens,

you’ll freeze to death.

i cannot exhale love onto your fingertips,

bring feeling back into your bones,

without you first reaching for me.

and i want to be angry

(god, i want to be furious)

but how can i be, when the only thing

your body knows

is how to weather

a midwest

winter?

————————————–

Nix Carlson called us from Lexington, KY.

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I hang my jacket in the hallway

her apartment is old

made from shoestring potatoes

it smells like a jelly factory.

Against the wall a man’s face

eyes folded

laces around his neck.

That’s your Uncle, dear.

He barred her

from doing much of anything

when he was around

then he died.

She asked the doctors

to keep his eyes and brain

alive and put them

in a fish tank.

That night when she got home

she put on a mambo record,

poured herself a vodka, lit a cigarette,

and blew smoke in his eyes.

The tank is down the hall

full of algae and bubbles.

She has it hidden

behind a curtain.

On the wall are photos

of President Gerald Ford,

our family on vacation,

and antique pictures of naked ladies.

How many naked ladies do have to look at

before I get something to eat? I ask.

I’ll think about it, she says.

Behind the curtain skirts are hung up,

sponges tied together,

a bag of teeth.

My Auntie takes a photo of me

so my parents will see

the child they raised,

buzz-cut, roadworthy.

My Auntie tells me stories

about my family,

takes me shopping,

for sweaters and sneakers.

When she gets excited

she makes the sound

of a happy seagull

and spins like a mooring buoy.

————————————–

Bill Ratner called us from Los Angeles, CA.

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